1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to network communication systems and more particularly to systems for providing remote access to network resources.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic messaging (e.g. e-mail, chat, SMS, MMS) has become a critical tool for doing business: the ability to react rapidly to customer or colleague messages translates into a competitive advantage. Consequently, many commercial solutions have been developed to enable users to receive electronic messages while they are away from their desktop workstations. At one time, special-purpose devices filled this need, but increasingly multi-purpose devices which provide a variety of services including two-way e-mail, instant messaging, telephony, and web surfing are being used.
Many known special- and multi-purpose devices provide for remote e-mail communication. However, such solutions have critical drawbacks. Personal data assistants (“PDAs”), now commonly referred to as ‘Smart Phones’, and emerging “combo” devices such as the Blackberry™ Pearl™ or the Apple™ iPhone™ are expensive, and the network service charges supporting such devices are prohibitively high. Consequently, only few of the members of typical enterprises have benefited from such devices. Although ubiquitous cell phones are capable of receiving and sending e-mail, they suffer from small displays and small keyboards, and so are relatively difficult to use for electronic messaging.
Despite the fact that known devices provide for remote electronic messaging, they do not address the other part of the problem: overloading is a common complaint, with most corporate users receiving too many electronic messages daily resulting in inefficient work habits as users are continuously interrupted to check incoming messages. (This is above and beyond the spam problem, which in most enterprises is now 80% remedied by anti-spam and anti-virus filtering solutions.) Electronic message overloading is a problem on dedicated mobile messaging devices, and especially on typical cell phone devices with limited storage and display space making the solution generally unusable.
Furthermore, a growing majority of corporate electronic messaging users fall into a new category sometimes called “prosumers”: corporate employees with non-corporate commitments that heavily impact their performance at work, such as child-care and personal, family or social networking messages. For these users, a single device providing access to both corporate and personal messages has not been available without forwarding personal messages to the office (or vice-versa), which for privacy and/or governance reasons has thus far not been an acceptable option.
In addition many corporate scenarios involve “communities of interest”, or “closed user groups”, where employees collaborate on shared research or common goals. In such scenarios, employees may share responsibilities, particularly in their need to act promptly on new information. Furthermore, when key group members are away from their offices, some communications destined for them should be shared to other delegates or to the group in general. However, known mobile solutions attempting to meet these requirements generally require significant effort to configure, and thus have not been particularly successful.
There is therefore a need for a mobile solution which provides combined access to multiple corporate and personal messaging accounts and modalities (e.g. e-mail, chat, web mail, social groups, Skype™ messages), interfacing with corporate infrastructure and Internet mail servers, intelligently supporting collaborating users, but which is agnostic to mobile device or handset type and is sensitive to electronic message overload while mobile. There is further a need for solution which miniaturizes or otherwise tailors message content for rendering on mobile devices generally.
Similarly, the World Wide Web is now widely used for all aspects of business and the ability to be made aware in a timely manner of the availability on the Web of contextually-important new content and services gives a competitive advantage. In cases where a user is away from his or her workstation a handheld device is typically used to search for new content and services. However, most handheld devices are ill-suited to display or otherwise access Web resources not specifically designed with the limitations of mobile devices in mind, and in many areas of the world mobile surfing costs are significant. Although many Web services provide notification of new content via SMS/MMS and e-mail, the more general practice is to use RSS feeds (or competing mechanisms). Such RSS feeds can be rendered in a mobile browser (subject to the same significant surfing costs), but require the user to proactively check for new content. In addition, there are no mechanisms where agents act as user proxies to broker for new services and deliver alerts based on what they find on the Internet.
There is therefore a need for a solution which provides notification of new or updated content and services automatically to handheld devices, which is agnostic to mobile device or handset type, and which miniaturizes or otherwise tailors Web content for rendering on mobile devices generally.
In addition, there are many services available through the Internet and other networks apart from electronic messaging and the Web, and while they may not presently hold as important a place as these two services in general, particular enterprises will sometimes have need of particular services not commonly utilized, including the ability to receive unsolicited content and transactions from these services remotely. Furthermore, as network computing and telecommunications evolves, new services are developed and adopted which users may wish to access remotely or receive notifications from using handheld mobile devices.
There is therefore a need for a solution which provides for automated pushing of changes to Internet or other network resources on an extensible basis, to accommodate the particular needs of a particular group of users, or to adapt to the development of new services, which is agnostic to mobile device or handset type, and which miniatures or otherwise tailors the outputs of such services for rendering on mobile or fixed devices generally.
In addition, a system as described above which is readily capable of implementation in both enterprise and web portal contexts is advantageous, as both operators of enterprise systems as well as systems to be accessed seamlessly in a broader context will be able to implement the system without customization to the context.
Furthermore, a system as described above which works with the mobile device to enable a response to the notification or alert using alternative capabilities of the mobile device, such as voice calls or TXT-ing in response to an e-mail, is advantageous.
Several solutions have been proposed which overcome some, but not all, of the above-described challenges. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,499,021 to Abu-Hakima describes a computer-readable system and method for interpreting and selectively forwarding an interpreted message derived from a user's received electronic message, such as an e-mail, fax, converted voice and pager messages, to a mobile communications device of the user. However, the reference does not teach a system which is adapted to be extensible to alternative and emergent content types or transactional service content, or that can forward an interpreted message as multiple smaller parts when necessary to meet changing channel capabilities. Furthermore, the reference does not teach a system which is capable of accessing multiple messages sources, and is capable of both enterprise and portal implementations. Neither does the reference teach a system which is capable of forwarding interpreted messages that incorporate ‘active content’ tags that enable simple initiation of voice or TXT responses to content or transactional services. Similarly, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,820,237 and 6,823,331 to Abu-Hakima each describe some, but not all, aspects of the above-described needed solutions. U.S. Pat. No. 6,820,237 discloses a computer-readable apparatus and method for intelligently analyzing and highlighting key words/phrases, key sentences and/or key components of an electronic document by recognizing and utilizing the context of both the electronic document (which may be any type of electronic message such as e-mail, converted voice, fax or pager message or other type of electronic document) and the user. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,823,331 discloses a concept identification system useful in reducing and/or representing text content of an electronic document and in highlighting the content of the document. However, neither reference teaches a system which is capable of accessing multiple messages sources or transactional services, of both enterprise and portal implementations, of multiple transmission modes, of finding new web content or services, and of incorporating active content added by knowledge of the user.
Thus, there remains a need for a solution which provides timely notification or alerting of new/updated electronic messages and web content or services, which is readily extensible to provide access to other content types and sources, supports closed user groups, active content for response, and supports multiple ways to reach the mobile device based on availability and cost factors. The solution must be agnostic to mobile device or handset type and be adapted to miniaturize or otherwise tailor content for rendering on mobile or fixed devices generally. In addition, the solution must be readily capable of implementation in both enterprise and web portal contexts. Finally, the solution must be dynamically extensible for handling new and unexpected content types and Internet services.